What is Business Transaction Management (BTM) and Why You Should Care

I’d like to share my vision and definition for what I feel best describes Business Transaction Management (BTM). I’ve started a new page to track this emerging area, value proposition, marketplace, vendors and technology approaches. I’m planning a series of BTM oriented guest authors and podcasts as well as deeper dives into BTM as it relates to my emerging BSM Value Proposition model for 2009. Feel free to join in the conversation!

First off, let’s talk about just what a transaction is. Here’s my current working definition.

Transactions are one of, if not the most, critical components of how IT supports the business in meeting business goals and objectives. They are the simple and complex entities that get work done. They are the “movers and shakers” within the IT environment that are actively responding to client or business requests via the business services and applications that IT delivers. They move key data and information between infrastructure components that make up complex end-to-end business services and applications that exist in nearly every company today.

There are many common types of transactions and transactional architectures deployed by IT to support getting things done within companies today. These include the most common n-Tier (web, appsvr, db) transactions, the much hyped Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) approach, the tried and true mainstay of Mainframe (CICS, IMS) based transactions and I’m sure many others could be added to this list in the EAI, Complex Application, Web, J2EE, Mainframe or Network Service Provider areas.

I also like to bundle into this area something that’s likely not often thought of when we discuss types of transactions or transactional architectures and that’s the area of transactional based Workload Management (Batch Job/CRON) and Managed File Transfer (FTP/SFTP/SCP) type solutions. These technology areas have a very transactional based nature and are often responsible for getting some of the most high value units of work done within a typical enterprise. They should not be forgotten from any modern day or leading edge BTM solution.

What is Business Transaction Management (BTM)?

My views for BTM span many areas and focus on the following types of BTM activities. The BTM marketplace has vendors focused on one or more of these areas. Hopefully we can establish a uniform way to classify vendors and their technology, products and solutions into these or other categories.

Transaction Discovery and Inventory: Techniques for discovering transactions whether active, passive, configured, scheduled, or in-flight, for the purposes of establishing relationships between dependent systems, applications, databases, components, etc. based upon this transaction discovery as well as establishing an inventory or repository of transaction information. This would be used to extend a configuration management system, database (CMDB), asset management system or other. Ideally, we’d use this capability to establish the finite business relationships each transaction has, how it supports a business service, application or other unit of work, the impact if the transaction fails, blocks, queues, is slow, etc.

Transaction Tracing: Heavily focused on in-flight transactions, flows and paths, transaction tuning and optimization, transaction troubleshooting, complex relationships with other systems applications databases. This section includes transaction latency tracking, timing and profiling.

Transaction Monitoring: Focused on monitoring every aspect of the transaction, performance, availability, capacity, SLA, timings, etc. This section includes latency monitoring, an area of critical importance in many financial and trading environments.

Transaction Intelligence and Analytics: The application of sophisticated analytics to transactions to learn, monitor and managed transactions with applied intelligence. This is often seen in the financial and telecommunications industry as anti-money laundering solutions, credit card or other fraud or abuse of services/networks or similar solutions aimed at watching for patterns of activity or behavior as seen in transactional activity. The Business Activity Monitoring (BAM) and Business Process Management (BPM) areas are also very focused on using transaction intelligence and analytics to drive the business, make better decisions and respond to changing conditions in the business environment.

Transaction Management: General term, focused on all of the above areas. I consider a transaction management solution as one that provides capabilities across all of these areas rather than just one or two.

Are there and other areas?

Why does Business Transaction Management (BTM) matter?

BTM is a key component of my “BSM Value Proposition” model and a maturing BSM strategy for any company. I’m tempted to say that if you’re not incorporating BTM into your BSM strategy than you’re likely to never get real value from your BSM solution.

I think BTM matters because the transactions are the things that get stuff done in business. It doesn’t matter if you have vendor x, y or z software, application, database, etc. they could all be black boxes. It’s the transactions that flow in and out of those things, those finite units of work that are the backbone of every business.

The future will be filled with clouds or generic compute capability full of loosely coupled services, interfaces, and transaction pipelines to get work done. Things we know today as web servers, application servers, database servers, etc. will all be commodity black boxes in the future and we’ll program against API’s or other loosely coupled interfaces to accomplish work or move data and information between the IT environment components.

Understanding the performance, availability, capacity, reliability, and impact of these transactions on IT and the business is critical just as it has been for the traditional IT infrastructure that enables them. This level of understanding and impact must not be limited that of the typical IT organization, application or integration architect, developer or administrator. Transactions and their impact must be easily understood by the folks on the front line, within IT management and the line of business. Every transaction’s contribution to the bottom line or impact on a higher or lower level system, interface or business goal or objective must be thoroughly understood.

Folks, it’s simple. Transactions that don’t complete, fail, slow down, queue up, hit a bottleneck, etc. will impact the business in significant ways. Batch jobs or other file transfers that don’t complete can cost companies in many industries large fines and penalties, lost revenue, botched orders, and ultimately upset customers or business partners. Managing end-to-end transaction flow and user experience could easily be said to be much more important than anything else you do in the network/systems/application management & monitoring area.

How important are transactions in your environment? What are you doing to increase your ability to think, operate and respond differently by deploying transaction management within your organization?